CK1: Colin Kaepernick

He's the backup who took his team to the Super Bowl, the football player with the 95-mph fastball, the guy who ran roughshod over defenses last season but was coached in high school to never run the ball at all. In other words, the most unpredictable and least understood elite QB in the league right now

The statistics are shameless—sixty-mile-per-hour spirals! 181 rushing yards against the Packers in the playoffs! a 38 on that esoteric and lewd-sounding metric known as Wonderlic!—but the most mind-blowing of them isn’t gaudy. Just...weird.

"I want you to know," Colin Kaepernick says, "that I had negative running yardage as a high school quarterback. Yes, I was fast. Yes, my coaches knew I was fast. But we had no backup QB." And at six feet five and 170 pounds, Kaepernick seemed like such a fragile emu that his coaches were terrified he’d get injured. "So they told me not to run."

The San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who took over as starter ten games into the 2012 season, then came just three errant passes shy of bringing the 2013 Lombardi Trophy back to the Bay Area, accompanies this declaration with a broad smile and a forceful tap-tapping of his right index finger against a table. It is the one and only instance of cocksureness he allows himself during our time together. He’s amused by this counterintuitive stat of his, but not as much as he’s proud of it, and edgily so. Because in its inverted way this non-number speaks to a much larger point: that one should be very careful making assumptions about where Colin Kaepernick’s unorthodox quarterbacking style came from and what it "means."

Do you know what you’re seeing when you look at Colin Kaepernick? Do you? Fact is, people have been staring at this gangly biracial Adonis all his life and getting him dead wrong. So hold your answer for a moment to consider when you’re seeing Colin Kaepernick: at the cusp of a golden age. Has there ever been such a bounty of quarterbacking talent in the NFL? It’s not just the sheer mass of it, the fact that even before last year’s astonishing freshman class of Luck, Wilson, and Griffin, there were already a half-dozen future Hall of Famers in the mix. It’s the diversity, the multifacetedness of it, the spate of quarterbacks with track speed who can simultaneously read and improvise, and may not even conceive of reading and improvising as distinct abilities. And it’s not just that there are more of these guys than there have ever been; it’s that coaches are building teams around them rather than force-fitting them into offensive molds.

Still...it takes some getting used to. Many of us football fans don’t, or even can’t, yet fully believe in the likes of Kaepernick._ Yes, he’s miraculous,_ we think. But you can’t build a dynasty on..."that." We followers of this most militaristic of sports, with its medieval-minded conquests of turf, are the proverbial armies fighting the last, rather than the current, war. And this new breed of QB who comes bearing the promise of old-fashioned out-of-the-pocket artillery and drone-like speed and accuracy seems too good to be true. When confronted with the likes of Kaepernick, a 25-year-old possessed of neon athleticism yet an almost pathologically shy demeanor, a guy who really has no antecedent, we tend to ask a question—yes, that old question—that simplifies and judges in equal measure: Is he a "student of the game" or a "great natural athlete"? In other words, is he a traditional quarterback who can stay in the pocket and play with his head, or a sandlot scrambler who can improvise on broken plays (but will be out of the league the minute he loses a step)?

Do we have to mention the racial coding that comes with this either/or proposition?

Actually, we do. Because three weeks after Kaepernick took over from the concussed Alex Smith in last year’s ninth regular-season game, a national "controversy" erupted over his tattoos. Sparked thusly in a Sporting News column that, oddly, sidestepped the fact that most of Kaep’s tats quote biblical passages extolling God’s Providence: "Approximately 98.7 percent of the inmates at California’s state prison have tattoos.... I’m also pretty sure less than 1.3 percent of NFL quarterbacks have tattoos. There’s a reason for that. NFL quarterback is the ultimate position of influence and responsibility. He is the CEO of a high-profile organization, and you don’t want your CEO to look like he just got paroled."

Ah, yes.

Thus the emphatic finger, the knowing smile, when Colin Kaepernick brags on that negative high school running yardage—on the fact that he spent his formative years in the pocket, developing vision, playing "disciplined" ball: "smart" ball.

That pleasant, amused, edged tone of Kaepernick’s manages to impart knowingness without assigning blame. He’s got a thousand stories of being mistook, of others getting their signifiers scrambled by his presence. This confusion happened on the field—he sent his high school highlight reel to one hundred Division I schools and heard back from exactly none—and it happened off the field.

To some degree this is understandable, given the Colin Kaepernick backstory: Teresa and Rick Kaepernick, sweethearts since they were 14-year-olds growing up in rural Wisconsin. Rick becomes a cheesemaker. They have a healthy boy in 1977, then a healthy girl, then two baby boys who die of congenital heart failure after twenty-three and four days, respectively. Heartbroken, they decide to adopt. Teresa tells the social worker that she doesn’t care about race or health, and in 1987, Colin, the biological son of a black man and a white woman from Milwaukee, becomes a Kaepernick; four years later, the family relocates to California.

"Colin knew from the very beginning that he was different," Rick says. "I mean, it was pretty obvious. Either my wife or I had an affair, or something else was going on, right? So when he asked about the color of his skin, we’d just say, ’You’ve got such beautiful brown skin! We’re jealous!’ We never wanted him to feel that he was white or that he should be. Only to be who he needed to be. In eighth grade, he was a big Allen Iverson fan and wanted cornrows. We had to go all the way to Modesto to find a guy who did that."

"On summer vacations, it happened every time," Colin says. "We’d be checking into a motel and somebody would come up to me as I’m standing next to my family, all nervous, and say, ’Um, can I help you with something?’ "

All that said, knowing, as you surely do if you’ve seen him play, that he’s a spectacular natural athlete: Is Colin Kaepernick a student of the game?

"Colin was obsessed with problem solving, with figuring out how things worked," recalls Amy Curd, his pre-calculus teacher at John H. Pitman High School in Turlock, California. "He always sat in the front of the class." Even when he got a 96 or 98 on a test, Kaepernick, who ended high school with a 4.1 GPA, "was only interested in what he’d done wrong. It was never about the grades—he was in that class to learn."

Two hours after Kaepernick went thirty-sixth in 2011’s draft, he met head coach Jim Harbaugh at the Niners compound to study film. It speaks to his character, this studiousness of Kaepernick’s—the grit and willfulness of it. Yet there’s something about it that’s beyond will and character, something involuntary.

"All my life I’ve had these flashbacks, these dreams, nightmares, daymares, like visions, where I relive certain plays," he says. It’s never the highlight-reel stuff. Just the junk.

"Only the bad plays. I see them over and over, as if somebody’s rewinding a tape and forcing me to watch. Some of these are recent." The three goal-line incompletions that preserved Baltimore’s slim lead as time dwindled in the Super Bowl play frequently and vividly. "But some of them go back to high school. Every time I relive these mistakes of mine, I’m also forced to ask, What could I have done different? What decisions could I have made? This stuff haunts me, but I like it, because it makes the game hard. And the more I study, the more comfortable I feel with what a defense is going to do.

"Sometimes, when things are going really well, I feel like I’ve already seen things—it’s the flashback feeling in a good way. Like I’m watching a rerun, because I’ve studied this defense and know what comes next. Now, that is a good feeling, when your mind is working fast because you’ve studied and you realize, I’ve seen this before."

Compliment Kaepernick on his marquee moments—that monster fifty-six-yard TD run against the Packers in the playoffs, say—and he’ll smile politely and, in his reedy, almost faint voice, thank you. But the only time he gladly accepts and engages with a compliment about his game is if it concerns the way he uses his head on the field (focused, calm, confident) and off (focused, calm, humble). He doesn’t have much to say about his talent. Not really. Only about what he chooses to do with it.

"I think the biggest part of my game that’s underestimated is the mental part of it," he says. "Probably because it’s invisible. You can’t see the hours I put in. It is funny to me that because I can run, because I’m athletic, people tend to see that as my only asset. And that’s fine—I hope they continue to see it that way [and underestimate me]. Look, I won’t say that view is ’racist.’ I will say it’s stereotypical. I’ve just heard it so many times before."

Another funny thing about the guy: He was considered a better baseball than football prospect coming out of high school—ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball, two no-hitters—and when he was in college the Cubs drafted him. So why football? Given his family background, Kaepernick’s explanation is striking—and not one you’d expect to hear in the era of free agency, when a typical ten-year football career may span five franchises.

"You know what I love most about this game? You know what I miss the most when I’m away from it? Being around my teammates. That’s it! Growing up, when I dreamed about playing in the NFL, it was never about being famous, never about the roar of the crowd. It was about other players, because there is no other sport where you rely on your teammates so much. The fact that you can go out there and trust ten other people without even looking at them, that’s amazing. That you can build that type of trust and have that type of confidence where you can throw a ball without seeing where a receiver’s at, and just trust he’s gonna be there and make a play. You have to have that trust because it’s a physical sport where people get hurt. There’s that much more at stake. I love trusting my well-being to those ten other people. And I love the trust those ten people put in me to lead them, to figure out what they need in order to make them as good as they can be.

"Do you know what that feels like, to know those guys have my back and not worry about that? I couldn’t feel any of that as a pitcher. On the mound it was just me and the batter. And the questions were all about me: What can I do to throw him off? What can I do to beat him? But there was not that trust, that feeling of relying on others and others relying on you. That feeling of ’It’s just you’— I didn’t like that."

An amazing amalgam, Colin Kaepernick. Stylistically, an acrobat. Mentally and spiritually, old-school, with the Knute Rockne-ish non-self-regarding self-regard of a faceless soldier in a Crusade.

Something Joe Namath once exclaimed about another quarterback applies to Kaepernick, both for its ebullience and for its smack-yer-head literality: "He’s a football player! On a football team! That likes to throw...the football!"

In other words, Kaepernick is a guy who’s earned the right to be taken at face value. He doesn’t want to be an icon, and his tats aren’t ghetto or anti-authoritarian or disrespecting or black. They don’t mean anything other than what they literally say. (God is good!) He dislikes and distrusts fame—it’s never been about "the grades," the accolades—and certainly doesn’t want to deploy it in any way. He’s a devout Christian who wants his god "to shine through" everything he does. But he’s not looking to "signify" anything at this point in his life, and to his credit, he doesn’t. He just is. And what he is, and wants to be seen as now, is... Well, Colin Kaepernick said it simplest and best in a letter he wrote to himself back in the fourth grade:

_I hope I go to a good college in football, then go to the pros and play on the niners or the packers even if they aren’t good in seven years. _

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